Saturday, May 22, 2010

Conservatism

"A wise and frugal government," Thomas Jefferson declared in his first inaugural address in 1801, "which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." He later warned: "To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

While Jefferson was a renaissance man of sorts, farmer/academician/statesman, he was a strong proponent of entrepreneurship and the development of industries and technologies. He saw that, left unfettered (as leftists like to say), government would quell both ventures like a cancerous tumor grows and kills its host. I teach manufacturing technology at Bakersfield College. It gives me an interesting perspective, being a public employee who provides training in support of private industry. The CTA is the one of the many tumors sucking the life out California, transforming it from an industrial powerhouse into and industrial-grade poor house.

I gotta say I am surprised Washington Puke actually published something in support of the free market.

The second paragraph put’s it down nicely

This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country's future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise -- limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. These visions are not reconcilable. We must choose.

The statists want to control people not by legitimate ways (e.g. elections) but though unaccountable ways (e.g. executive orders, bureaucratic regulations, judges finding things in legal documents or the Constitution that no one else can find). And they don’t want people to choose. They want to take power.

A great example of the arrorgance of the statists was when B Hussein Obama said recently "...I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. ..."

I think Jefferson would be suicidal with grief when he has seen what has become of the republic he helped found.